A method and an arrangement of the above kind are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,191,880 and the references cited therein.
The radial polarization suggested in U.S. Pat. No. 6,191,880 for objectives having a typical image end numerical aperture NA=0.5 to 0.7 and a resist without an antireflection coating is well suited for suppressing disturbances caused by the polarization-selective reflection on the resist at angles of incidence in the region of the Brewster angle.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,365,371 and 5,436,761 disclose the arrangement of polarization-selective means for radial polarization also in the pupil plane (system aperture) of the projection objective.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,691,802 discloses a catadioptric projection objective wherein a polarization plate is arranged in the pupil plane of the projection objective. This plate has an inner circular zone and an outer annular zone which generate linearly polarized light mutually orthogonal and, at the same time, have different indices of refraction. In this way, two non-interfering light beams are provided which generate different image planes. A relationship to the kind of illumination is not provided. The numerical aperture of the given examples is at most 0.6.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,755,027 discloses axicon arrangements for the generation of radially as well as tangentially polarized light.